The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics.
The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida.
Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.

Enseigné par

Dr. Gary LaFree

Director

Bill Braniff

Executive Director

Kate Izsak

Education Director

Joyce Rasing

Transcription

Hi my name is Gary LaFree, and I want to talk in the next two lectures about the spatial distribution of worldwide terrorism. How is terrorism distributed around the world? In order to do this I'm going to be relying on our Global Terrorism Database which is supported at the START Center, we call it the GTD. Which for these lectures includes over 113,000 terrorist attacks going back to 1970, so from 1970 forward. And to divide the lectures up, in this first lecture I'm going to talk about worldwide patterns and regional patterns. And in the next lecture I'll talk about how terrorism is distributed around the world by countries and by cities. In many ways this lecture is related to my earlier lectures about the myths of terrorism. And one of the things I want to plan out in this lecture is that some of these myths are not that accurate when we actually look at how it It's been distributed over the last more than four decades. I think in part the ubiquity of modern communication systems means that individuals are getting so many images of terrorism wherever it happens around the world, that it makes us think that it can happen, or that it is happening everywhere. And this blanket coverage, I think, makes you think that it's concentrated when in fact, what we're going to be showing is it tends to be fairly concentrated in specific locations. And interestingly, these locations change over time. If there can be any good news about terrorism, it's that if you're in a high terrorism area during one period of time, it's very likely that that's going to be true forever. It's very likely that within ten years or even less that terrorist attacks are going to be concentrated in fact somewhere else in the world. In terms of major regions of the world we see that they're variable in terms of how much terrorism they are that there's quite a bit of change over time. We also see that the geographical distribution of terrorist attacks and fatalities are very different in different places. Many regions of the world have had very little terrorism, other regions of the world have been cursed with a fair amount and many regions, countries, and cities have large numbers of attacks during one period but not over the next period. So in the next two lectures I want to talk about the geographical dispersion of terrorism based on the global terrorism database. And I'm going to start by taking the broadest perspective by looking at terrorist patterns for the whole world. What do we see if we look at the worldwide distribution of terrorism? I'd like to begin by dividing the countries of the world into a set of 13 different regions. The next slide shows the number of total and fatal attacks for these regions for the years 1970 to 2011. Perhaps the most striking feature of this figure is that more than half of the terrorist attacks in the GTD are concentrated in just three regions, the Middle East North Africa which is about 20%, South Asia which is about 19% and South America which is about 17%. Only two other regions of the world account for more than 10% of the total and this would be Western Europe And Central America and the Caribbean. Two regions account for about 6% of the total. This is Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. North America and Russia each account for around 2% of the total. And the remaining four regions each contribute less than 1% of the total attacks. So you can see even at this very aggregated regional level you can see just how concentrated modern terrorism has been. This slide also shows substantial variation across regions in terms of fatalities from terrorism. So as with total attacks, the two lead regions are the Middle East, North Africa And South Asia, which jointed account for nearly half of all the fatalities recorded in the GTD. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, and South America each count for around 13 to 15% of total fatalities. In fact if we combine Central America with South America to create a Latin American region It would have a larger share of total fatalities, about 25% than any other region of the world. So, clearly, lots of activity also in Latin America. Southeast Asia counts for about 5% of total fatalities. There are three regions that account for between two and 3% of total fatalities from terrorism. This would include Western Europe, North America, and Russia. None of the four remaining regions account for more than 1% of the total number of terrorist fatalities. This slide also shows the spatial patterns of attacks and fatalities and how they differ from each other. In particular, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and a lesser extent Central America and the Caribbean, are notable for having high proportions, or higher proportions, of fatalities than attacks. So in other words, more fatalities compared to attacks. So for example, Sub-Saharan Africa may be the most extreme example. It accounts for 15% of worldwide fatalities, but only 7% of worldwide attacks. So in other words each attack in Sub-Saharan Africa tended to kill more people. And we see the opposite pattern in places like Western Europe, North America, and South America. To a lesser extent Eastern Europe and East Asia. These are regions that have a higher proportion of attacks than fatalities. And of all of these, the region that's most striking is Western Europe, which accounts for 14% of total terrorist attacks. But only 3% of total terrorist fatalities. So in other words, Western Europe is notable for having lots of attacks without lots of fatalities. Next I want to look at total attacks by region over time. So in other words, how do attack patterns by region vary if we look at these attacks over time. So in the next figure I show the top five regions in terms of total attacks for each of the four decades included in the analysis. And as you recall from what we just talked about these five regions in fact account for a very high proportion of all terrorism. Perhaps the first thing we can say about terrorism from this slide is that there are considerably fewer terrorist attacks in the global terrorism database in the 1970s than there have been since then. In fact, the five high frequency regions included in the GTD have the most cases in the first decade of the 21st century. This is followed by the 1980s and then the 1990s. But within these broad patterns we also see considerable change across regions of the world. At the most general level, attacks from Western Europe dominated the 1970s. Attacks from Latin America, and here I'm including both Central America and South America, dominated the 1980s. During the 1990s, attacks were fairly evenly spread between the Middle East, North Africa, South America South Asia and Western Europe. And finally attacks have been concentrated during the last ten or 12 years in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Overall Western Europe accounted for 47% of all attacks in the 1970s. So Western Europe was a very important as a locus for terrorist attacks in the 1970s. South America and Central America, by contrast, combined accounted for 55% of all attacks in the 1980s. In the 1990s, South America, South Asia, and Western Europe, if we combine them, accounted for 50% of all attacks. And finally, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia accounted for 66% of all attacks in the first 12 years of the 21st century. So you can see generally how terrorism has moved from Western Europe to Latin America, to South America, South Asia and Western Europe, and finally, to the Middle East and South Asia. If we look at terrorism in the 1970s, we see that it was dominated by a number of very well known terrorist organizations originating in Western Europe. There were during this period, especially notorious campaigns by the IRA in Northern Ireland, by the ETA in Spain, by the Red Brigades in Italy. But after peaking in 1979 with more than 1,000 attacks, terrorism in Western Europe drops to an average of only 128 attacks per year in the first decade of the 21st Century. On the other hand, annual attacks in South America and Central America are among the top five leading regions in the 1970s. And continued to rise in the 1980s, peaking in South America in 1984 with nearly 1,500 attacks and in Central America in 1981 with over 1,100 attacks. Terrorist attacks in South America during this period were driven especially by the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, in Peru. And the movement of the revolutionary left in Chile and terrorist attacks in Central America during this period were driven by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. By the 1990s total attacks from Central America had fallen off considerably so that this region is no longer on the top five In terms of total attacks. South American attacks fell off in the 1990s, but not as rapidly as those for Central America did. In the first decade of the 21st century, the South American region is no longer among the top five in terms of total attacks. Terrorist attacks in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa became much more prominent after the 1990s. The Middle East, North Africa accounted for 19% of attacks of the top five regions in the 1990s, but doubled and over doubled to 32% of the top five in the first 12 years of the 21st century. The two groups in the Middle East/North Africa had the most attacks in the 1990s were the Kurdistan Workers Party, also known as the PKK in Turkey, and Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya or IG in Egypt. The lead groups in the first 12 years of the 21st century were the Salafist Group for Preaching and Fighting in Algeria. Al Qaeda across many countries and Hamas in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The south Asian region accounted for nearly 17% of attacks for the top five regions in the 1990s and nearly 35% in the first decade of the 21st century. And the two groups from South Asia that had the most attacks in the 90s were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the LTTE in Sri Lanka. And the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the MQM in Pakistan. The lead South Asian groups in the first decade of the 21st century, where the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the communist party of India. Between the two of them they had over 1,400 attacks. To summarize, then, this slide shows the steady decline in terrorism attributed to Western Europe, the steady increase in terrorism attributed to the Middle East, North Africa and to South Asia over these four decades. Terrorist attacks were concentrated in Latin America in the 70s and 80s and South America still had a relatively large share of terrorist attacks in the 90s. However, by the first 12 years of the 21st century neither South America nor Central America were major regional centers for terrorism. The only decades where North America region is among the top five most active regions was the 1970s. And this was primarily because of leftist organizations operating in the United States during this period. Five regions, Russia and the newly independent states, Eastern Europe, East Asia, Australasia Oceania and Central Asia are never listed among the top five regions in any of the four decades. So just to reiterate this, five of the 13 regions never show up in any of the decades as among the top five. In the next lecture, I will consider how modern terrorism has evolved and how it's been distributed across countries and cities. Thanks very much for your attention.